nothing!"

On that day, when the woman takes her place beside the man in the
governance and arrangement of external affairs of her race will also be
that day that heralds the death of war as a means of arranging human
differences. No tinsel of trumpets and flags will ultimately seduce women
into the insanity of recklessly destroying life, or gild the wilful taking
of life with any other name than that of murder, whether it be the
slaughter of the million or of one by one. And this will be, not because
with the sexual function of maternity necessarily goes in the human
creature a deeper moral insight, or a loftier type of social instinct than
that which accompanies the paternal. Men have in all ages led as nobly as
women in many paths of heroic virtue, and toward the higher social
sympathies; in certain ages, being freer and more widely cultured, they
have led further and better. The fact that woman has no inherent all-round
moral superiority over her male companion, or naturally on all points any
higher social instinct, is perhaps most clearly exemplified by one curious
very small fact: the two terms signifying intimate human relationships
which in almost all human languages bear the most sinister and antisocial
significance are both terms which have as their root the term "mother," and
denote feminine relationships--the words "mother-in-law" and step-mother."

In general humanity, in the sense of social solidarity, and in magnanimity,
the male has continually proved himself at least the equal of the female.

Nor will women shrink from war because they lack courage. Earth's women of
every generation have faced suffering and death with an equanimity that no
soldier on a battlefield has ever surpassed and few have equalled; and
where war has been to preserve life, or land, or freedom, unparasitised and
labouring women have in all ages known how to bear an active part, and die.